Multimedia Journalism

Some magazine links

A random list I might use in class today...

• Dazed Digital
• Monocle
• GQ
• Esquire
• Wired
• i-D
• Flavorpill
• Sport Magazine
• Grazia
• Time Out 
• JPG
• SuperSuper
• Mute
• Eureka
• MagCulture Blog
• Anorak
• Bad Idea

Today's session

Today is the last day of the course, which you know, obviously...

There are various things we have to do. Most importantly, you need to write a reflective log about the Multimedia Journalism module, the work you've done, what you think you've learned etc... You should write about what you liked in the class, how you think you'll apply the skills you've learned in the future, what you didn't like, what you would have liked to have seen more of etc.

I'll talk some more about this in class today. But the key thing is not just to list what you did but to reflect on it, to set it in some sort of context, re your own career and skills and perhaps the journalism industry as a whole... The log is all about showing us that you know how to learn - which, admittedly, sounds a bit silly, but in the media/creative industries in general, the ability to teach yourself knew skills, to identify what you need to learn, to consolidate the skills you pick up as you work - all of these are really key to building a successful career.

To help you with your log, Reza and I will give you some feedback about the work you've done so far. You can also give us some feedback too.

You should publish your reflective log on your individual blogs. You don't have to write a lot - though you can if you want to... Around 500 words should be fine.

Aside from the log, you could finish off anything that needs doing on both your individual blogs and the group blogs. And I have a feedback questionnaire that I need to get you to fill out. I'll explain this more in class.

I'll also talk a bit about how your work will be marked... The British university grading system is a bit different to other universities around the world... If I tell you a bit about it now, it will help you interpret your marks when you get them...

Why learning how to blog is useful and Scott Rosenberg's 'Say Everything'

One thing I wanted to talk about last Thursday (but I forgot) was blogging and what Dave Gilbert said about it when he came in to talk to you. Dave talked about how all big news sites are run via content management systems. These are often hugely complex, tailor-made pieces of software created especially for the organisation using them. But in essence, to the journalist using them, they work like the free blogging services ordinary people use to create their blogs - i.e. like Wordpress.com, which we've been using to create blogs for this module.

So if you can master working with Wordpress, which means understanding how to add content - text, pictures, video, links, widgets etc - to a basic template, then you'll understand the basics of working with a content management system and should be prepared for what you might encounter if you go to work on a bigger site.

That's one of the reasons why we get students to set up blogs - so they develop an understanding of simple content managements systems.

Incidentally, if you're interested in blogs and the history of blogging, a great book on the subject has just come out in the States. It's called Say Everything and is by the highly respected author/tech journalist, Scott Rosenberg. He used to work at the online magazine Salon and now writes books. He's been covering blogs since they got started and his own blog is always an interesting read.

His new book (I've now read about two thirds of it) feels like it's going to be the definitive early history of blogs - it's full of interesting interviews with blogging pioneers and astute analysis of blogs and how they fit into the larger story of the net and how it's changing the established media world. You can read excerpts on the Say Everything website - for example, a chapter on Justin Hall, an American student who pioneered blog-style self revelation on the early website he created in the mid-90s, and a chapter on the conflicts between journalists and bloggers.

What you need to do for the group blog

Sorry - I seem to have confused everyone about what you need to do for the group blog, Ten Days in London. I'll try again...

You need to do three new posts. What you write here is up to you - you could do a review, an opinion piece, a media filtering-style post about current London news, a interview with someone from London... It's up to you.

I suggested that you could also add two old posts to the group blog from your own individual blog. So if you wrote a review there that you think would work well on the group blog, you can re-post that. If you think your vox pop  video would work well on the group blog, you can re-post that too. That could be one of the two things that you post. Again, what you repost from the group blog is up to you... I suggested you do this so that the group blog looks a bit busier and full of content...

The other thing you should add to your group blog is your video diary. I think you should be finishing these off on Wednesday...

So, overall, it's three new posts (these should be text-based posts, so you get to practice your writing), two old posts (these can be text posts or video posts, it's up to you) and your video diary...

The other thing you need to do is to work together to sort out the look and feel of the blog. So choose a decent template, write an About page, add relevant widgets to the sidebar, create a banner and change any other settings you think need changing... I think Reza has already talked to you about working together as a group on this and dividing up the various tasks.

Remember, the aim is to create something that is like a little commercial online magazine that will appeal to a specific target audience - international students like you who are visiting London and want some advice on how to get the best out of their time here. So think about the kind of template they would like, the information they would need to understand quickly what your blog was about, the sidebar links and content they would find useful...

One more thing about your group blog

I've just been looking at your group blog - I can see some of you are posting material there, which is great. One thing you need to sort out this week as well - you have to work together as a group to improve the look of the blog. This just means choosing a template, adding widgets to the sidebar, as you have done on your individual blogs, perhaps creating a new banner for the blog, perhaps writing an About page about the blog...

What you should do here is assign tasks to invidual members of the group. You all have admin rights, so you can all make changes to the blog - from choosing different templates to adding widgets and changing the settings... Discuss amongst yourselves today what needs to be done and then divide up the tasks. You don't need to do anything complicated - just the kind of thing you've done on your individual blogs...

More multimedia journalism links

During the powerpoint last Thursday, I talked about building on Paul Bradshaw's ideas about adaptability and the news diamond and thinking about how to combine different media types to tell news stories more effectively...

There's lots of experimentation going on in this area at the moment. People are trying out new combinations of media and new ideas to see what works.I mentioned some sites that are good places to go to keep up with what's new:

• Multimedia Shooter
• Interactive Narratives
• KobreGuide

Regina McCombs wrote a great rundown of interesting multimedia projects in 2008 for Poynter Online - that's still worth looking at.

As for some specific projects you could look at, I mentioned a few in class:

• Jonas Bendiksen's The Places We Live - there are a few technical glitches with this site at the moment, but when it's working - which it seems to be at the time of posting, it's really interesting
• Dai Sugano's Left Behind
• The New York Times' One in 8 Million

With the latter, we looked at the audio slideshow about the urban taxidermist, but there are lots of other pieces about individual New Yorkers with interesting stories, jobs or lives...

Multimedia Journalism links

In the powerpoint on Multimedia Journalism which I went through last Thursday, I mentioned a couple of writers whose work is really worth looking at in more detail, if you want to think more about this whole area.

Henry Jenkins has his own blog, where he talks over his current research. His book - Convergence Culture - has been out for a while. When it was first published, he put some introductory notes about it on his blog.

Paul Bradshaw runs a brilliant blog about online journalism - his guide to the BASIC principles of online journalism is on his blog. The series covers brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity and community/conversation.

On Thursday, I focused on adaptability and linked the ideas there to some of Paul's other writing about how news organisations should change to respond to the net - in particular his ideas about the news diamond. That post is part of a larger series of posts about the 21st Century newsroom, which are also worth looking at.

Assessments

Just a quick reminder about the assessments - we went over this last Thursday but I thought I'd put the details on the blog as well. 

Your individual blog

Your individual blogs will make up the individual assessment portfolio for the module. This counts for 60% of your overall mark. On your individual blogs, you need to write at least four things:

• An opinion piece
• A review
• A media filtering piece
• The email interview with Reza's contact - the Iranian blogger currently living in Turkey

You also should put your video interview with Dave Gilbert on your individual blogs, along with your vox pop video.

That's all you need to do, but if you want to write more/add more video, you can. On the last day of the module (Thursday this week), I will also get you to write a reflective log on your individual blogs. But we'll talk about that then.

The Group Blog

The idea here is that you should work on this together over the last part of the module. I'd like you all to do five posts each for the group blog.

Two of these can be things you've already done for your individual blogs - so you could repost one of your reviews or opinion pieces or one of your videos... I don't think the interviews  - with Dave or the Iranian blogger - will fit the subject matter or target audience of your group blog, so you probably shouldn't repost those. 

The other three things you do for the group blog should be new things - reviews, perhaps, or opinion pieces, or short round-ups of news in London - whatever you think will work...

The other thing you should post to the group blog is your video diary. The plan is for you to finish off your video diaries on Wednesday this week...

You can add more to the group blogs if you want... One thing you could very easily add is pictures. If you take interesting photos as you travel round London, you could post those. Some of the most popular blogs are photoblogs, which consist mainly of pictures. For example, The Sartorialist, which I think I mentioned in class in the first week, features pictures of interestingly dressed ordinary people, taken by Scott Schuman, who runs the blog. The text is minimal - it's all about the pictures.

If you do add just a single photo, that won't really count as one of your three original posts to the group blog - I want you to do some writing for that. However, if you take lots and turn them into a slideshow, that would be different.

Media filtering

One form of journalism that seems particularly well suited to blogs is media filtering. I've asked you to write a media filtering piece for your blogs. But perhaps I should give you a bit more detail on what exactly it is...

All news media organisations indulge in media filtering. Newspapers round up how other outlets are covering a particular story. Broadcasters do the same - they often review the big stories in the newspapers.

So, in a way, bloggers are only following the lead of the big media here. However, media filtering works particularly well online because blogs can link directly to the media stories they mention... So if a blogger praises a particular news piece for its detailed coverage, you can click on the link (if they include one) and read the piece yourself.

Many people say that media filtering on blogs is response to the general information overload we experience online. There is so much online, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and uncertain about what to read or pay attention to. The best bloggers can be like editors for the web - they highlight the interesting stories and put them into some sort of context for us.

So how do you write a media filtering piece? Well, first you need to identify an interesting current news story, something that has been covered in different ways by different organisations, something that has provoked discussion online... You need to find examples of that coverage and those discussions online...

Next - when you write the piece, use the traditional 'inverted pyramid' structure we talked about in class before. Start with the key information - a quick summary of the news story and why it's interesting... That's your first paragraph.

Your second should then start to link to and talk about coverage elsewhere online. Point to the range of coverage this story has inspired. This could include other news stories or comment pieces or even online discussion or other blog posts...

You could conclude by summarising what you see as the general response to, or take on, this particular story. You could also add your own view on the story, your feeling about which online organisation is covering this story the best...

In a way, media filtering is a kind of online reporting. But instead of going out and gathering original news, you stay online and look at different forms of news coverage. As a result, some people say it's a bit parasitic. But you can provide value for your readers if you set things in context, if you find sources of information they may not know about...

We can talk more about this in class as you put together your own media filtering pieces.

Online research tools

Some more info re-posted from earlier this year, when I was teaching Multimedia Journalism to the Westminster BA students - this is a quick run-down of some useful online research tools. We'll talk about these in class if there's time.

There are all sorts of new online research tools that are worth experimenting with. Some have been going for a while. Others are relatively new. These are all worth trying out:

• Blog Search Bloggers can help you find interesting stories online and place those stories in useful/illuminating contexts. Bloggers can be good sources for quotes too - and many are often happy to respond to student enquiries. So how do you find bloggers and keep track of them? One way is to use Technorati or Google's Blog Search
• Zeitgeist Search There are lots of sites that set out to let you tap into what people are talking about/searching for online. I'm not sure how useful they all are, really. Best know is Google Zeitgeist, which lets you see what people are searching for. Google Trends lets you track the relative popularity of different search terms over time. Omgili is a specialised search engine that tracks 'subjective information' - discussions, opinions, reviews etc. It has lots of interesting tools to play around with - for example its Buzz Graphs. 
• Social bookmarking The idea here is that you can bookmark sites online and share those bookmarks with others in ways that let you find more interesting stuff. Del.icio.us was the pioneer in this field. Some sites have adapted the social bookmarking idea for news and news editing - one of the best known is Digg. 
• People Search There are various sites that set out to help you find people online. Many are mostly American in focus. Some just search for a person's online presence. Others tap into databases of public information - telephone directories, the electoral roll in the UK. Pipl, Wink and Spock are all American sites. 192.com is a UK based site. Again, it's worth playing around with these to see how useful you think they are. 
• Network Search/Aggregation Various sites set out to be a one stop shop, letting you search YouTube, Facebook, blogs etc all from one place - for example Whonu and Sputtr. Addictomatic puts together a page of information resources from the net, based on your search terms. Netvibes is like a supercharged Google Reader - you can create a page that pulls together feeds, info and various useful widgets.